The spring I was six­teen, I frac­tured my neck in a car acci­dent. My best friend and I were on our way to Ari­zona to spend a week with her grand­ma; we left Ann Arbor for the Detroit air­port before dawn, in a storm. Her mom was dri­ving — we hit a patch of ice and went spin­ning until anoth­er car slammed into the side of ours. I remem­ber the wet, wavy head­lights com­ing toward us, the stag­ger­ing noise, the fly­ing and falling as we flipped from the road into a ditch. Land­ing felt like my ribs col­laps­ing, bones com­press­ing into a flat­tened, ago­niz­ing mess. My best friend was cry­ing, and then, in the hideous silence of the back­seat after, she asked me if we were dead. We weren’t sure what that was, what this was. There was the not know­ing, and her famil­iar voice: are we dead? The expe­ri­ence of that par­tic­u­lar uncer­tain­ty — in my body and mind — has stayed with me for thir­ty years.

My best friend and her mom were okay. I was okay — I broke a good bone, not the one a notch low­er, which would have par­a­lyzed me, not the one high­er. I can’t remem­ber what they said about that one. I tried not to hear, want­ed to keep worse fear and more fear and oth­er fear out. In the months that fol­lowed the acci­dent, I wore a neck brace and stayed still. I’m a nat­u­ral­ly fre­net­ic per­son; moments of manda­to­ry still­ness are always strange and tricky turns for me. In the brace, I began trav­el­ing fran­ti­cal­ly in my mind. I made up sto­ries that took place else­where, any­where oth­er than in that brace, in my body, in the dread I couldn’t out­run. I had writ­ten poet­ry for­ev­er already — ter­ri­ble rhyming dog­ger­el about high-school ath­letes I was in a rota­tion of dat­ing and break­ing up with. But some­thing about the way the weeks stretched out as my neck healed made me seek a longer form of order.

Hav­ing thought I might be dead, I sud­den­ly knew, in the way that we can know for a bit after hor­ror befalls us, that it, what­ev­er it may be, can in fact hap­pen. And will. There are those who live with this fear all the time, and when I first felt it, I also first imag­ined what it might be to feel this way con­stant­ly, for­ev­er. My ter­ror was too vast and amor­phous to be exam­ined or ordered by way of any short form. So I wrote, by hand, in com­po­si­tion note­books, a roman­tic nov­el. It had no car acci­dent in it, was set in Chi­na (where I had spent child­hood sum­mers), was def­i­nite­ly ter­ri­ble, and gave me a beau­ti­ful escape. I can still see the way those lined pages looked, full of words, the only con­trol I could take.

The chilly feel­ing of the acci­dent has come back to me, pinned as I am, as we all are, by the plague and by fear for the world. There is a col­or­ful, sharp aspect to the way every­thing looks, and I’m try­ing to write my way out of my mind. How, this time? What con­nec­tion is there between the shapes our projects take and our par­tic­u­lar states of dis­ar­ray? I write across the genre range (fic­tion, non-fic­tion, and poet­ry), and have spent this unrec­og­niz­able Spring per­co­lat­ing the orga­niz­ing pow­er of art and the ques­tion of what form might best con­tain this dif­fi­cul­ty. The neck brace days gave a daunt­ing but long view, one of linked chap­ters. Over four months of lock­down, I’ve writ­ten exclu­sive­ly son­nets. Their rules are so tidy, con­straints so sta­ble. Rhyming lines and blocky stan­zas feel order­ly. I am respon­si­ble for invent­ing only what fits inside those com­pact units. Iambic pen­tame­ter echoes con­ver­sa­tion; by hon­or­ing the nat­ur­al cadence of speech, iambs cre­ate a love­ly coun­ter­point to har­row­ing con­tent: ter­ror, ster­il­iza­tion, vio­lence, beloved peo­ple dying alone, all of us need­ing to be kept apart in order to keep each oth­er safe.

Maybe the com­ing months will change where we are, and call for some­thing longer than three stan­zas and a cou­plet, let me unbuck­le the seat­belt of iambic pen­tame­ter. Maybe not. I keep think­ing of James Baldwin’s descrip­tion of the dif­fer­ence between preach­ing and writ­ing: ​“When you are stand­ing in the pul­pit, you must sound as though you know what you’re talk­ing about. When you’re writ­ing, you’re try­ing to find out some­thing which you don’t know. The whole lan­guage of writ­ing for me is find­ing out what you don’t want to know, what you don’t want to find out. But some­thing forces you to anyway.”

What will so much uncer­tain­ty and dis­or­der mean for writ­ers? The fresh­ness of this new and com­plex con­text, how­ev­er awful, might give us a view of our­selves that is at once dif­fer­ent and dis­tant, a poten­tial­ly pro­duc­tive shock. Our abil­i­ties to live, feel, and think all require an almost fear­ful won­der, a com­pul­sion to dis­cov­er what we don’t know. And, as Bald­win bril­liant­ly sug­gests, may not want to know.

There is so much I don’t want to know, and yet I keep flick­er­ing over the macro and micro suf­fer­ing again and again. I’m des­per­ate to look away, but can’t pos­si­bly avert my eyes. This con­tra­dic­tion is com­mon, I know, human, and not sur­pris­ing; I’ve felt sick­en­ing ver­sions of it many times before. How do we ask — our­selves and one anoth­er — about the relent­less mur­der of Black Amer­i­cans; about what’s hap­pen­ing at our bor­ders; about coun­tries we’ve dev­as­tat­ed; about chil­dren impris­oned in deten­tion facil­i­ties; about count­less atroc­i­ties? How do we under­stand a glob­al pan­dem­ic? What do hun­dreds of thou­sands of deaths look like?

Lit­er­a­ture gives us a way to look close­ly, to do the work of imag­in­ing unbear­able suf­fer­ing, our own, and every­one else’s. Liv­ing in the syn­tax, imag­i­na­tions, and sto­ries of peo­ple oth­er than our­selves, we get to inhab­it their lives ful­ly and pri­vate­ly. And this changes us. As Vir­ginia Woolf puts it, books ​“split us into two parts as we read,” because ​“the state of read­ing con­sists in the com­plete elim­i­na­tion of the ego,” as well as ​“per­pet­u­al union with anoth­er mind.”

This is a read­er meet­ing a writer, but we can also feel it as a divi­sion of our­selves as writ­ers, into more minds than one — in a good way. Fic­tion is a tick­et to flee­ing our lim­i­ta­tions (whether phys­i­cal or psy­cho­log­i­cal), con­nect­ing even with char­ac­ters we might dis­dain, fear, or fear becom­ing. Read­ing and writ­ing put us in oth­er people’s inte­ri­ors, give us the beau­ty of neat­ly made lan­guage, and the expres­sion of what we knew in our own mar­row to be true, but couldn’t yet artic­u­late. Toni Mor­ri­son gave us Peco­la Breedlove in The Bluest Eye, and like most women of my gen­er­a­tion, I grew up feel­ing Peco­la was real, that I knew her, and had access to her long­ing. How else, oth­er than liv­ing in their pages, could we have learned the empa­thy that know­ing the Breedloves taught? There’s no way.

When the bound­aries between self and oth­er dis­solve, it’s pos­si­ble to real­ize how many peo­ple have felt what­ev­er it is we are feel­ing, no mat­ter how nov­el each pain seems. James Bald­win said in an inter­view in Life Mag­a­zine: ​“You think your pain and your heart­break are unprece­dent­ed in the his­to­ry of the world, but then you read. It was Dick­ens and Dos­to­evsky that taught me that the things that tor­ment­ed me most were the very things that con­nect­ed me with all the peo­ple who were alive, or who had ever been alive.”

Recent­ly, my supreme­ly thought­ful stu­dents at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go asked a series of ques­tions about anguish in the lives of writ­ers, whether we need to be trag­ic, tor­ment­ed. I was glad to be old enough to tell them (truth­ful­ly): I don’t think so. Instead, writ­ing can be a place where we quar­an­tine our worst fears and impuls­es, find­ing the right con­tain­er for each dark­ness: an ado­les­cent nov­el to mea­sure the months it took to get my bones back togeth­er; son­nets to orga­nize an exam­i­na­tion of what I don’t want to know (but must find out).

Of course we all cre­ate and tell sto­ries in count­less ways and spaces: details of our days we shape as a way to make them mean­ing­ful and man­age­able; our mem­o­ries and dreams we repeat to assess what they mean (and who they make us); our loves and tri­umphs we mark; and our tragedies we write, speak, and repeat to endure. Nar­ra­tives we know — books and poems we remem­ber for­ev­er — are tem­plates for our own expres­sions. The most vul­ner­a­ble among us are often robbed of the pos­si­bil­i­ty of telling their sto­ries, get­ting to define themselves.

But every human being needs a say, and a way to lis­ten to, see, and imag­ine per­spec­tives that are not our own. This is why we cre­ate and read fic­tion­al char­ac­ters, to know them, to prac­tice, to expand into mul­ti­ple ver­sions of our best and worst selves. This seems an espe­cial­ly impor­tant exer­cise with peo­ple we don’t know at all, those whose expe­ri­ences feel impos­si­bly dif­fer­ent from ours.

My favorite expres­sion is the Chi­nese jing­di zhi­wa, a frog in a well who looks up and thinks it can see all of heav­en, but is actu­al­ly see­ing only a lit­tle cir­cle of the sky. The frog needs to leave the well in order to see the world or under­stand any­thing about her place in it. Some­times fear is a well; sor­row, too. Genre can be a well.

I often can’t see my projects with­out leav­ing them, which requires work­ing on oppos­ing projects: mov­ing from an his­tor­i­cal war nov­el to a slim poem, from a screen­play with the strictest pos­si­ble econ­o­my back to lux­u­ri­ous prose. Then, from the out­side, I can see what’s hap­pen­ing in the project I fled, and fix what wasn’t work­ing, what I couldn’t see coher­ent­ly from the inside. Will this moment of stand­ing out­side of our lives allow for new clar­i­ty about what’s around us, and about our­selves, reinvented?

This shared ter­ror is an awful ver­sion of a pri­ma­ry expe­ri­ence of new­ness. Our days and activ­i­ties are changed and unusu­al; our teach­ing, think­ing, and writ­ing all sud­den­ly require rein­ven­tion. Hav­ing lost our famil­iar ref­er­ence points, we must reimag­ine our­selves. When I can be cheer­ful about it, this chal­lenge reminds me of the pow­er of reading.

Cer­tain ques­tions may be best asked by par­tic­u­lar gen­res. For me, those requir­ing pre­ci­sion and an econ­o­my of glit­ter­ing effi­cien­cy tend to be poems. When the mar­gins allow for an epic sweep and scope, or I’m trapped in a brace, I make a nov­el. Some­times (like this moment, writ­ing this), a core truth begs to be expressed by way of the frank­ness of non­fic­tion. Genre is a bound­ary best blurred, writ­ing as shape-shift­ing as the infi­nite ques­tions we have to ask our­selves and one anoth­er. These days, dimin­ish­ing bound­aries feel a lot like hope, reveal­ing mul­ti­ple ways to reach out across expans­es threat­en­ing to dis­tance us for real.

Every night in Chicago’s south loop, need dri­ves thou­sands of us to our win­dows and bal­conies to flash lights, sing, wave, and say: I see you. Some­times, in the cir­cles of light, I catch sight of those head­lights com­ing from my mem­o­ry of the acci­dent; oth­er times I see starlight, dis­co balls, sparklers. Watch­ing and lis­ten­ing, I try to con­trol my own nouns, to keep intact times I’ve danced, cel­e­brat­ed, lived.

We were not dead. I’m try­ing to remem­ber how I respond­ed to my best friend’s ques­tion that day in the crushed car: I don’t think so? I don’t know? I hope I said I love you. The truth is, I can’t remember.

So maybe this not-son­net is a let­ter back to the 1980’s, or for­ward to an era when we’re all out of this brace. As change­able as our projects, we’ll morph with them, because ask­ing, imag­in­ing, and under­stand­ing are syn­chro­nized tasks. I am young again in my mind now, my own first read­er, wait­ing to find out what hap­pens next. Hop­ing to trans­mit, too, to any­one who wants to keep me com­pa­ny. And to hear and read you back, always on receive.